Introducing Depo: stock management for small businesses
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A spreadsheet or a notebook works up to a point. Once the item list grows, two shelves become three and a second stockroom appears, knowing what is where, and how much of it, gets hard. Depo is an iPhone app for exactly that point.
Who it is for
Businesses of one to five people: shops such as hardware stores, stationers and spare-parts sellers; workshops; e-commerce sellers; small wholesalers. There is no server, no account and no setup. You open the app, name your first warehouse and start.
How it works
Everything in Depo is built from three things:
- Items: name, SKU, one or more barcodes, unit, cost and sale price, minimum stock, photo.
- Locations: warehouse → shelf → bin. Every location has a QR code; print its label and stick it on the shelf.
- Movements: stock in, stock out, transfer and adjustment.
Stock is never a number you type over. It is the sum of the movements. An item’s stock in bin A1-02 is what went into that bin minus what came out of it. So the history is never lost: a mistake is fixed by a new movement that corrects it, and both stay on record. You also cannot take more out of a shelf than it holds.
The daily work
- Scanning. Your iPhone camera is the barcode scanner. A known barcode opens its item, and you record stock in or out from there. In Rapid In, scan incoming goods one after another and tap Done to record them all at once.
- Counting. Count a shelf or the whole stock with your phone and get a variance report at the end. More in counting stock with a phone.
- Seeing what is short. Items below their minimum stock are on the Low Stock list, grouped by supplier. The reorder list is a ready order draft you can send to the supplier by message or email.
Where your data is
On your iPhone. When you are signed in to iCloud, also in your own private iCloud database, synced between the devices on the same Apple Account. Depo has no server, and we cannot see your data. The Privacy Policy has the details.
Free and Depo Pro
The free plan has 50 items and 1 warehouse, with scanning, stock movements, counts, low stock and suppliers. Depo Pro adds unlimited items and warehouses, label printing, export and import, widgets, and three more features:
- Document reading: reads the lines from a photo of an invoice or delivery note and records them as stock in once you confirm.
- Ask Depo: ask questions like “Which items are running low?” in your own words; answers come from your own records.
- NFC shelf tags: read the tag on a shelf to see what it holds.
Document reading and Ask Depo run on Apple’s on-device model and need an iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence. Prices are on the Pricing page.
What it does not do yet
For now Depo is a tool for one person. There is no team sharing; sync works only between devices on the same Apple Account.